


Late Night Musings

by MissMoe



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Despair, He isn't the man I fell in love with, Heartbreak, Insomniac Levi (Shingeki no Kyojin), Introspective Levi, Love Hurts, M/M, This drabble is depressing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 04:04:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13022871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMoe/pseuds/MissMoe
Summary: Levi mulls over the realization that Erwin isn't the man he thought he was.





	Late Night Musings

 

 

Levi brought the cup to his pale lips and took another slow sip of black tea. He didn’t allow himself many indulgences but tea was one of them, cleanliness the other. It was two-thirty in the morning and he was sitting in his room, alone and trying to remember what had come first: the insomnia or the addiction to tea. The image of a snake swallowing its own tail idly drifted before his mind’s eye. He was so tired and yet so buzzed, his body going one way, his brain the other. He felt himself falling heavy as a stone into a bottomless pit of insanity.

Things had taken a turn for the worse, as if that were even possible. Every day was a shitshow, but lately…Levi had stayed behind during the most recent campaign—the injury to his left leg rendering him impotent as a soldier—only to see Erwin return with his right arm bitten off below the shoulder, the limb sitting in some titan’s gullet or regurgitated along with all the other needlessly consumed human body parts. Erwin’s skin was a map of scars but he had never lost a limb, not before at least, and Levi couldn’t stand to think that his commander might still be whole if only he had accompanied the squad on their mission to rescue Eren.

Levi had visited with Erwin earlier in the day and found him to be in good spirits despite the missing arm, which was more than Levi could say for himself. He wondered bitterly if Erwin could even understand what it meant for him, the fact that Levi would never feel that arm around him again. And then Hange had barged in with Connie and proposed her theory that the titans were actually humans. Levi almost went into cardiac arrest. That was bad enough—the implication that he might have been slaughtering people all this time—but the look on Erwin’s face was even more devastating. Erwin was smiling. Smiling! Smiling like a goddamn lunatic, as if he’d been told a cheerful piece of news rather than something morally appalling. At that moment, Levi realized that Erwin’s right arm wasn’t the only thing he had lost; he had lost Erwin altogether.

He had followed Erwin—fought for him, submitted to him, loved him—because he believed they were on the same side striving for the same goal: to save humanity. It was a noble if not not tragic endeavor, something that gave meaning and purpose to their wretched existence. It was the ultimate self-sacrifice: to give one’s life for the good of all. But now it became clear that Erwin’s greatest desire was for personal satisfaction, to find the answer to the question that had troubled him all his life, to unravel the mystery of the titans, of humanity’s lost history, to atone for his father's death. Everything Erwin had done, he had done for himself, and Levi had given himself to this man, a man driven by purely selfish reasons, but it was too late to turn back now. He gazed at Erwin in silence. Blood was seeping through the bandaged stump, Erwin's handsome face unshaven as he sat in the bed muttering like a gleeful child about getting one step closer to the truth, a truth that lay buried beneath a mountain of rotting corpses.

Could he go on loving a man like that? Could he go on following him? The man he had loved and followed was gone. Or perhaps Erwin had never been that man at all; perhaps he was merely someone Levi had conjured up from the depths of his own aching, yearning need. The tea was lukewarm when Levi took his next sip, but he drank it down anyway. He felt so hollow inside—as if his heart had been torn out along with the man he had thought was his other half—and now there was a gaping hole in his chest where once had been everything he had held dear. Who was he now? And why did it all hurt so much when he had already died?

 


End file.
